This Is What Victory Looks Like

We’ve officially declared victory in Iraq. This morning, the US officially handed over the reins of power to the Iraqi government, and by December 31 every US troop will be out of the country. President Obama wasted no time in traveling to Fort Bragg (cue the irony) to praise the troops — and, of course, pat himself on the back for pulling it off. This is what victory looks like.

Lord, I hope he’s right. But if he is, it would be pretty much the first time.

Remember when General Petraeus testified before Congress and talked about the “surge” policy to help defeat the insurgents? Then-Senator Obama blasted the policy, said it was doomed to failure, and voted against General Petraeus and the plan.

And don’t forget Joe Biden. He voted against the first Gulf War, in 1991, voted for the Iraqi invasion, and actually proposed his “solution” to Iraq — partitioning it into three states. That prompted a rare unity among Iraq’s factions — they all agreed that Biden was an idiot.

The military wasn’t too confident about pulling out now. They wanted to keep at least a moderate-sized force in Iraq, but the Obama administration couldn’t reach an agreement with the Iraqis. Well, that might not be quite true — they didn’t reach an agreement, but they didn’t try very hard. At one point, they went about six months without no official discussions with Iraq on the matter.

As I said, I hope like hell this works. I hope the nascent Iraqi government can withstand the pressures from within (insurgents) and without (Iran et al). But the cynic in me sees parallels to the Keystone Pipeline issue. In that one, Obama decided to postpone his decision until after next year’s election. I suspect that on his desk is an intelligence report saying that the current Iraqi government can hold things together for about a year, and then will fall apart. In Obama’s calculus, that would let him proclaim victory right through the next election — and that’s all he needs and cares about.

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I think militarily this is a very bad decision. But since I am convinced Obama is using the military for political ends, I do not want our brave men and women put in harms way for a commander that does not have their best interests at heart. Bring home the Afghan troops also. This bozo of a leader is all jello.

He continues to brag about Osama’s assassination, which GW Bush would never do. GW. Bush wiped out 49 of the 52 deck of cards and he didn’t grand stand with each kill.

Someone stopped the miltary from going back to the downed helicopter to destroy it as well as the drone in Iran. That would be ‘chicken shit’ Obama.

What bothers me most is the people that still defend this idiot. ww

Anonymous

Nailed it. If we’re not there to ‘win’, then it’s time to bring the troops home.

When it all turns to shit, Barry will find someone else to blame. SOP.

I think militarily this is a very bad decision. But since I am convinced Obama is using the military for political ends, I do not want our brave men and women put in harms way for a commander that does not have their best interests at heart. Bring home the Afghan troops also. This bozo of a leader is all jello.

He continues to brag about Osama’s assassination, which GW Bush would never do. GW. Bush wiped out 49 of the 52 deck of cards and he didn’t grand stand with each kill.

Someone stopped the miltary from going back to the downed helicopter to destroy it as well as the drone in Iran. That would be ‘chicken shit’ Obama.

What bothers me most is the people that still defend this idiot. ww

herddog505

From the left’s perspective, it’s a win-win:

— If Iraq manages to hold together, it’ll be because of Barry’s wise leadership in making them go out on their own.

— If Iraq fails, whether due to internal fractures or outright Iranian invasion, it’ll be Bush’s fault. After all, lefties have been predicting that the Iraqi government will collapse and Iraq will become an Iranian satellite for about eight years.

However, I have to agree with Wild_Willie: with Barry at the helm, the best place for our troops to be is as far from harm’s way as it is possible to be.

Oh, yeah. He didn’t. He even let Paul Bremer make the big announcement.

Sorry, my bad…

J.

Anonymous

Actually at the time I wish GW would have bragged on himself. But his humility wouldn’t let him. With Obama, there is no humility there. It is all him. ww

Anonymous

What did we win?

The treaty the Bush administration negotiated and signed in December 2008 (after the election) expires December 31st. The troops have to leave before then. A cynic might say Bush left a time bomb for Obama.

But most Iraqis wanted Americans out. The problem was immunity and impunity, which Iraqis were sick of after years of foreigners shooting up the streets of Iraq. Blackwater especially was a big FAIL. You could say the U.S. mission in Iraq failed in September 2007, when ‘roided up Blackwater guys shot up Nisoor square and killed 17 Iraqi civilians. After that, along with other things like the rape/murder of that girl and her family in Mahmudiyah, the Iraqis were sick of us.

herddog505

You’re swinging after the bell. It’s like yapping about Savo Island or Kasserine after V-J Day.

Anonymous

We shall see. My bet is that Iraq will not be an ally, because of bad feelings about the U.S. occupation, along with previous U.S. bombings and betrayals, that will persist for decades. Get ready for the big embassy to be downsized, or pushed out altogether. The Germans, Turks, Chinese and French will clean up commercially.

The USA never got the right balance in Iraq of firm maintenance of order and compassionate treatment that the occupations of Germany and Japan had. Instead, there was no plan at the beginning, too few experts, too many greedy contractors, and too many guys and girls with guns who thought they were paying back for 9/11.

In any event, the Iraq war only took money out of the pocket of the average American and indebted their decendents. No benefits for the USA as a whole. Some relatively few Americans were killed (4500+ with civilians) or maimed (tens of thousands), or lost family (tens of thousands). There is a much smaller number of Americans that made a lot of money out of the war.

herddog505

Well, you may be right. On the other hand, we did quite a lot more bombing and killing in Germany and Japan, and we get along reasonably well with them.

FWIW, I think the Diplomatic Corps in Washington went in with an intent to, if not fail outright, make Bush look bad to increase the chances of a 2004 Democratic victory. (Wut? Put politics ahead of everything else? Nah! Never happens in our government!)

But – that’s history now. Let’s hope this isn’t Obama’s ‘Peace in our time” speech, a prelude to a real mess to come.

Anonymous

The Diplomatic Corps? There weren’t enough diplomats in Baghdad in 2003-04 to make much of a difference.

How many diplomats does it take to fuck things up completely? (I’m starting to think any number greater than 0, and that includes fractions.)

How many ‘mistakes’ does it take to screw up contract awards, route aid money to the wrong people (or the ‘right’ people), to subtly (or not so subtly) sabotage with the wrong words in the wrong ear what the military was trying to do?

As an aside, how many times can a turbojet engine ingest a 16″ wrench carelessly left in an intake?

When you’ve got a massive undertaking going on in a complex and hazardous environment, and a military/diplomatic corp battle ongoing for primacy in the redevelopment of Iraq, if you’re looking to rack up points for your organization, the opportunities would be endless. You HAVE to have the utmost trust and cooperation – and by many accounts there was very little trust between the military and the diplomats.

Well, whatever. I figure in another 10 years the first reasonably accurate volumes will be coming out of the historians on the mess.

We also defeated them – they were enemies, remember. They surrendered.

We were supposedly fighting FOR the Iraqis – and as Chico points out there is very good chance they will not be our allies or sympathetic towards US interests because they kno wwe didn’t have their interests in mind..

Why? Because this was never about helping the Iraqi people and was all about occupying Iraq in a march towards reshaping the middle east. Iran and Syria were next – but Boosh booted it.

Bush failed miserably.

And the US will paying for the Republican efforts destabilize the middle east for decades, if not centuries.

Never again.

Anonymous

Stevie has a back door access pass to GW Bush’s intent. Wow! A real mistic in our presence. Does the left ever get tired of rewriting the truth? Nevermind. ww

PBunyan

And you and your fellow communists will be blaming Bush for the disasterous effects of Obama’s anti-American policies in the middle east (like unconditionally abandoning Iraq, not supporting the pro-liberty uprising in Iran, supporting the Islamofascist takeover in Egypt, allying with Al Qaeda in Lybia against Qdaffy, etc.) for decades, if not centuries.

jim_m

Well Chica, if that’s the case it falls directly on your hero obama’s shoulders. Bush won the war. obama is losing the peace.

Anonymous

And what did Bush “win” again?

Anonymous

The Iraq invasion was justified with questionable intelligence. W quit listening to Cheney in his second term when he realized that he was consistently wrong. This thing may be the biggest foul up in our nation’s history. By all means, bring ’em home. Let’s not sacrifice any more Americans to a foolish idea.

Cecil Bordages

Can’t let history be rewritten by ackwired. Actually, the intelligence was quite solid and agreed upon by every major power including the U.S., Great Britan, Germany, France, etc. Even the Democrats who say they intelligence reports agreed in public (see Senator, now Sec State Clinton for one example) that Saddam had and/or was most likely developing WMD. So when the war began there was almost total agreement on the WMD issue. It was only after we failed to find much WMD (sent to Syria maybe?) that the Democrats seized on the lack of WMD as a campaign issue. They cyncially tried to turn what turned out to be (maybe, see Syria again) poor intelligence into a “Bush Lied” meme. With the MSM pushing this meme for them, they were pretty successful. That’s probably how ackwired gained his/her “understanding” of this issue.

Anonymous

I do not think ackwired understands the troops. Once engaged, they want to win. For those who aren’t challenged mentally all this has to be put into the perspective of the events of the time. Hindsight is for football fans. Real grown up decisions are for the GOP. The name calling and juvenile behavior is for the dem’s. ww

Anonymous

It seems to me that you are ignoring some history. Initially no intelligence could be found to justify the Iraq invasion. In an unprecidented move the Vice President began personnally visiting the CIA to “review” the interpretations of the data. Then a “special” office was created in the pentagon to “handle” all intelligence relating to Iraq. From this office came all of the falsehoods fed to Colin Powell for his address to the UN.
Many CIA professionals left the service in protest of the politicization of the agency at this time.
Your alegation that everyone thought that Iraq had WMD’s is also questionable. Those in power around the world knew that Iraq had been working on nuclear capacity previously. But the UN inspectors could find no evidence of current activity and had to be pulled out of the country because Bush “Was losing his patience”.
I don’t think there is really any question that the intelligence was questionable. It was about as solid as Bush’s 16 words in his State of the Union address.

Cecil Bordages wrote, in response to ackwired:
Can’t let history be rewritten by ackwired. Actually, the intelligence was quite solid and agreed upon by every major power including the U.S., Great Britan, Germany, France, etc. Even the Democrats who say they intelligence reports agreed in public (see Senator, now Sec State Clinton for one example) that Saddam had and/or was most likely developing WMD. So when the war began there was almost total agreement on the WMD issue. It was only after we failed to find much WMD (sent to Syria maybe?) that the Democrats seized on the lack of WMD as a campaign issue. They cyncially tried to turn what turned out to be (maybe, see Syria again) poor intelligence into a “Bush Lied” meme. With the MSM pushing this meme for them, they were pretty successful. That’s probably how ackwired gained his/her “understanding” of this issue. Link to comment

Anonymous

I have a good friend who works as a private security contractor under the diplomatic corpse. One of his jobs is to gather intelligence, and he wrote me to say how once the military pulls out, it is open season on those who are still there. We either need to pull everrybody out and let it revert to a craphole, or we need to keep our presence there until the people have lived for relative peace for several years (and killed the bad eggs), and then when the military pulls out, they won’t remember or want the old pre-Saddam ways, and will police themselves.

Anonymous

For those of you who have conveniently forgotten, in January 2009 the US and Iraq signed a bilateral agreement which set forth the timetable and manner of withdrawal of our troops. Now I know George Bush’s term was up so I suppose what you all believe is that Obama must have negotiated all of this in a about a week or so he could prove to you his weakeness right now. Surely George Bush would never have done such a dastardly thing as negotiate a withdrawal- a terrible sign of weakness had he done so.
Sheesh—-god forbid the facts. They are so inconvenient so often for some of you folks.

(Shrug.) A bad idea is a bad idea, no matter what side of the aisle it comes from. But as it is, this is going down under Obama’s watch, so he’ll either get the blame or the credit for it, rightly or wrongly.

Anonymous

As I said, a cynical person would think the last president left a timebomb for this one when he signed the agreement in January 2009 requiring withdrawal by January 2012.

herddog505

And an even more cynical person would think that the current president is deliberately screwing it up for partisan purposes, to continue the meme that it was a bad idea, could never work, Bush was a liar and and idiot, blah-blah-blah.

Well, Clinton left a ticking time bomb for Bush re 9/11 (and again, to be fair, the supposed ‘warning’ that Bush got was on the order of “Al Quaeda was thinking about maybe hijacking some planes) – there’s no Presidency that exists in a vacuum. EVERYTHING a President does takes years to decades to work through all the ramifications.

I mean, look at what’s going on with the ‘Great Society’ programs of LBJ…

Anonymous

I agree.

Anonymous

Hugh G, it seems you have conveniently forgotten that GW Bush was getting tired of the political wrangling in the Iraq government which was impeding their ability to take over their own country. GW gave them an incentive. Reach these benchmarks and we will talk again. ww

Empowered Iran in Iraq and region. The Islamic Republic of Iran is the primary strategic beneficiary of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq. The end of Saddam Hussein’s regime removed Iran’s most-hated enemy (with whom it fought a hugely destructive war in the 1980s) and removed the most significant check on Iran’s regional hegemonic aspirations. Many of Iraq’s key Iraqi Shia Islamist and Kurdish leaders enjoy close ties to Iran, facilitating considerable influence for Iran in the new Iraq.

Created terrorist training ground. According to the U.K. Maplecroft research group’s most recent index, Iraq is the third-most vulnerable country in the world to terrorism. The years of U.S. occupation in Iraq created not only a rallying call for violent Islamic extremists but also an environment for them to develop, test, and perfect various tactics and techniques. These tactics and techniques are now shared, both in person and via the Internet, with extremists all over the region and the world, including those fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Stifled democracy reform. While the Arab Awakening of 2011 is a potentially positive development, there’s no evidence that the Iraq war contributed to this in any positive way. A 2010 RAND study concluded that, rather than becoming a beacon of democracy, the Iraq war hobbled the cause of political reform in the Middle East. The report stated that “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.” Rather than supporting democratic forces in neighboring Syria, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has repeatedly voiced support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Fueled sectarianism in region. The invasion of Iraq replaced a prominent Sunni Arab State with one largely controlled by Iraq’s Arab Shia majority. While the end of the oppression of Iraq’s Shia majority is a positive thing, this shift has exacerbated regional tensions between Shia and Sunni, including in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon, and Bahrain (where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based). Lingering disputes in Iraq between Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmen also continue to invite exploitation by both state and non-state actors.

So let me make it clear. We made Iran stronger since we removed Hussein. Iran could focus on crushing its own people under the pretense of freedom. And it could bolster itself from US attacks. We also had US personnel that were now on the frontlines of Arab displeasure at US policy. They were basically targets for the past decade.

Say what you will about the Arab Springs/Occupy movement, all of them had aimed for dictatorships in Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. Of course, Iraq would have been rebuilt by the people.

Final irony, the Iraqi government supports Bashir Al-Assad, who is linked to the Shiite Muslims, who don’t want Sunnis in Syria. Also, the Sunnis are out of government but they just did an exchange of bodies for the Iran war that was going on in the region. The symbolism is that they have just now said that they’re the ally of Iran. So let’s recap:

Wow! Going into Iraq made the Arabs hate us? First off, the Arabs have been wanting to kill us for almost three decades. They reached into our homeland in 1993, but according to the all knowing Jay, it was our inolvement in Iraq that really made them made. Secondly, Iran is Persian and does not like to be compared to the Arabs. Iran, for those of us old enough to remember, has hated the US and used that hate in their region since 1979. Your main thesis is very wrong. Unless you say in 1979 they hated us, then in 1984 they hated us more, then in 1993 they really, really hated us, then in 2001 they really, really, really hated us and when we invaded Iraq, well, we just plain pissed them off. You, Jay, cannot guage the MIddle East through the prism of Iraq and/or Israel. Know your history.

And it is an all volunteer force which we would pay for anyway. Equipment costs and supplies went up cost wise, but the human resources are about the same.

It costs us millions upon millions to keep Germany and Korea camps and I don’t recall one comment from you about those costs. Peace is expensive. The grown ups know that.

And your last paragraph of your flawed thesis is the biggest reason to maintain a military force in Iraq. Again, the grown ups see it.

I want the troops home for one reason. I do not want this bozo and chief using them as political pawns. We already had a democrat do that in the 60’s. ww

Anonymous

Your calculation of the start date for the Arabs “wanting to kill us for almost three decades” is underestimated by more than 13 centuries. The Arabs began their unending war again the non-Muslim world (Dar al-Harb or The House of War”) in the 630s AD. The only differences between the innumerable “campaigns” since are the target populations, principal players and the technologies utilized. The final objective – conquest of and submission by the non-Muslim world – was, after all, decreed by the servants of Allah! And who can argue with that?

Wow! Going into Iraq made the Arabs hate us? First off, the Arabs have been wanting to kill us for almost three decades. They reached into our homeland in 1993, but according to the all knowing Jay, it was our inolvement in Iraq that really made them made [sic].

That’s ignorance on your part. You’re misconstruing what I’ve said in an effort to discredit the information presented. Try again please.

Iran, for those of us old enough to remember, has hated the US and used that hate in their region since 1979.

*sigh*

The US had staged a coup which put the autocratic Shah in power in 1953 to secure Iranian oil and stave off pro-Communist powers. The Shah trampled the people until 1979’s Revolution which swept the Ayatollah into power. Guess what they inherited? All of those F-14s, but no access to the CIA trained SAVAK organization, whose leaders were brutally executed.

I wonder why they hate the United States?

You, Jay, cannot guage the MIddle East through the prism of Iraq and/or Israel. Know your history.
I’m wondering how you believe you somehow know more history than I do. You weren’t aware of US involvement in the Middle East until the late 70s? This should be interesting…

And it is an all volunteer force which we would pay for anyway. Equipment costs and supplies went up cost wise, but the human resources are about the same.

… What…?

It costs us millions upon millions to keep Germany and Korea camps and I don’t recall one comment from you about those costs.

That had no basis in the discussion. This was focused on Iraq. Why not talk about that instead of a strawman argument of your own invention?

And your last paragraph of your flawed thesis is the biggest reason to maintain a military force in Iraq.

Yeah, let’s break a sovereign nation, which the US put into power in the first place, piss off a lot of Arabs, turn them into friends against us, and take care of our troops who should not have been there in the first place.

You’ve made your argument quite succinctly.

Anonymous

….
Please, let me be wrong ….

Love to be able to oblige, this being the Season of Goodwill Among Men — and all — but reality’s a bitch!

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